Killing ego for Good………

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” – Abraham Lincoln

This quote ever since I heard of it has been challenging my thought process, because I assumed that at certain level every person must nurture “EGO” as a part of their behavior. However I dont mean of putting down the defences.

But then, couple of week’s back I had a major fight with one of my friend whom I had known since 2nd standard. I can’t remember for what reason, but at the end of the day we both left without seeing each other. Just like any other fights in the following days there were silent treatment and pretension of feeling disturbed by each others presence, sounds immature, isn’t it?

Weeks later in one of the party’s while my friends started introducing to new acquaintances, even I met couple of people. The laser disco light was directly beamed into the eyes, in that semilighting condition one could hardly see and assume what the other looked like. But even in this scene I could recognize this guy whom I was above to shake hands, my old buddy. The moment we saw each other we withdrew our arms back to our pocket as though we had touched a 230 volt shock or something, we felt embarrassed and left. For the rest of the party I was with my friends on the east and the other was on the west.

From then on several other occasions we either smiled blankly or pretended not to notice another. But I know this friend like my brother for a very long time, so it was difficult to pretend not knowing him.

Hesitantly then one day I decided to call-off the cold war and spoke normally to my friend. In return I got the usual suspicious look, the reason was quite obvious. But then I felt quite peace at mind as though I had done something great. So I made this practice every time and then carried on for business as usual.

Things went like this for quite sometime till one fine on Sunday my roomies told me that some friend of mine was waiting for me in the hall. You guessed it right, that was my old time buddy friend who had come to meet. He had come to invite me for a party, and without any apology or remorse we spoke to each with quite normal flow for 10 minutes or something.

Couple of days later I read this book on Abraham Lincoln where I read his words “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them” and then I realized that these were some signals for me to grow up intellectually. Break all these petty personal conflicts and “EGO” related matters, because I could not let my ego control my relationship with my friends and my behavior.

After lot of thinking I took one of the most bold decision of my life, I broke this mental barrier called “EGO” and messaged several of my old acquaintance on email or via SMS whom I believed to have communication gap and just sent “HI” as subject and the body of the message. I was quite taken aback the next day when found that almost 80% of the addressees responded to me. Some stories they shared were lengthy enough for a love letter but worth reading every word.